Eye-Fi Explore

If you lose track of the photos you’ve uploaded, the Upload History in the Eye-Fi Manager can remind you at a glance.

Digital cameras have eliminated the need to get prints made from film negatives at your local Fotomat. But there’s still the matter of getting your digital snaps from your camera to your computer--then sharing them using one of any number of online photo sites out there.

To solve this problem and eliminate the need for a physical connection between camera and computer, Eye-Fi cards use Wi-Fi to transfer photos from an SD storage card directly to the photo-sharing site of your choice: Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, Costco.com, Walmart.com, MobileMe Gallery, and many others. Eye-Fi released its first Wi-Fi-enabled SD card a few years ago, and in January it launched the 2GB Eye-Fi Explore card, which automatically adds geotags to all of your photos, even if your digital camera doesn’t have geotagging features built in. It was a nice coinky-dink that at the same time, iPhoto ’09 also added the Places feature, which takes advantage of geotags and organizes photos based on where they were taken.

The Eye-Fi Explore card is a no-brainer to set up and use. Using the included USB card reader, you insert it into a free USB port on your Mac and follow the onscreen prompts to determine what happens to photos that are stored on the card from that point on. Once you take a sample photo and it uploads, the setup screen also tells you if you need to change certain power-saving settings on your digital camera, necessary to make sure the camera stays on long enough for the Eye-Fi Explore to detect a Wi-Fi network and upload your pictures.

We set up our Explore card to automatically post photos to our MobileMe Gallery, which were then synced with iPhoto ’09. The end result: fast, easy photo-sharing, and nary a moment wasted getting our photos organized and in sync.

While more and more cameras are adding geotagging as a built-in feature, there’s no need to own a cutting-edge digicam to take advantage of geotags, which are just another layer of photo metadata--in this case, latitude and longitude--you can use to sort the snaps in your photo library. Flickr also lets you use geotags to “map” your photos--perfect for photographers who are lucky enough to travel a lot.

Compared to a standard SD card, Eye-Fi cards cost a pretty penny (2GB SD card street prices run low as $5, compared to the $129.99 retail price for the Eye-Fi Explore). But in the case of Explore in particular, you get quite a bit for the price: Unlimited geotagging, Wayport hotspot access for a year, and free use of the WebShare service to upload your images to online photo-sharing sites--all services that existing Eye-Fi card owners can add to their cards for a yearly cost of $9.99 to $14.99.

The Eye-Fi Explore is so much more than an SD card. With automatic geotagging and wireless photo-site uploads, anyone who takes tons of photos in a lot of different places can benefit from the ease of use and hands-off auto-uploading made possible by the Eye-Fi Explore.